Research is centrally concerned with the accommodation of Black elders in a racially/culturally mixed community in rural Appalachia. The specific objectives include 1) a general ethnography of the community as a whole, and 2) a specialized ethnography of aging which focuses upon the social support systems of selected elders. Theoretical focus is upon societal aspects of the aging process. General ethnography requires standard methods emphasizing participant-observation and key-informant interviewing, applied in an unrestricted way to achieve a holistic description of a community system. The specialized ethnography of aging is guided by specific questions concerning social support systems as wholes and also concerning the elder-other (usually elder-junior) relationships which compose such systems. Description of a social support system as a whole is particularly concerned with composition, in terms of the relative $ importance of kin, partners, associates, and institutional supporters; and with performance of the system in terms of actually providing support. Description of the component elder-other relationships involves description of each party in terms of his or her 1) resources, 2) requirements, 3) claims and obligations, and 4) alternatives and their anticipated consequences. Information pertinent to such descriptions will be sought from each party directly, from presumably disinterested third parties, and from the investigator's direct observations. The bulk of routine work involves a program of interviewing with elders and with others, guided by a general life-history approach and specifically by a heuristic scheme described in the proposal. The anticipated product is an ethnographic study in which the behavior of individuals in fulfillment of specific obligations to their elders is related to the prevailing structure of social control at a wider community level.